Judy Asks: Will Europe Remain the Anti-Global Warming Leader?

Jan CienskiSenior policy editor at POLITICO Europe

In one word, no. The EU talks a good game when it comes to climate, but it turns out that European politicians are having a very difficult time inflicting any level of pain on their publics in the name of climate policy. This week’s unexpected retreat by France over a fuel tax hike of only 3 percent, which sparked weeks of violent protests, shows that lack of public acceptance for such measures. In Germany, another self-proclaimed green leader, a government commission had to push back its deadline for a report on phasing out coal after resistance from eastern states, and an effort to impose a carbon tax earlier this year was quickly shot down. Poland, the coal-fired COP24 host, has constantly emphasized that decarbonization policies have to keep in mind economic and job impacts. Spain and Italy are also finding it tough to translate ambitious climate declarations into concrete policy. Of course, with the United States gone, even a tattered European commitment to the Paris Agreement puts it in front of other countries when it comes to climate diplomacy. The problem is going to be putting those promises into action.

Deborah GordonDirector of the Energy and Climate Program and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Europe will remain the world’s organizer and actor on fighting climate change. COP24 in Poland marks the twelfth global climate convening in Europe since 1995—more than any other continent. While some U.S. states are stepping up, their reach on climate mitigation is more local: modernizing grids in New York and Washington states, advancing electric vehicles in Delaware and Minnesota, and funding renewables in California and Connecticut. Europe, on the other hand, occupies the international stage—invoking trade policies, pricing emissions, and circulating billions in low-carbon financing. Even the European oil majors, including Shell and Eni, are proposing more aggressive climate targets than their global competitors.

The world simply cannot count on U.S. states to tip the scales on climate change. Despite recent historic wins for Democrats, most U.S. states remain red, and climate change is not at the top of— or even on—their agendas. And at the federal level, any climate action is more likely to come in the form of techno-fixes that involve geoengineering the earth’s radiation or removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. For solutions without significant moral hazard risks, however, the world will continue to look to Europe to chart the innovative and efficient path forward.

Dirk Holemans Director of Oikos

First of all, Europe has a moral obligation to remain the anti-global warming leader. Because of our historical, enormous contribution to climate change, we have to do better than the rest and reduce emissions faster. This is not happening at the moment. We see governments hijacked by their industries of the twentieth century: the car industry in Germany and the petrochemical sector in Belgium are two examples.

At the same time, people suffering from inequality are protesting against higher prices for fossil fuels, like the Yellow Vests in France. They rightly feel abandoned by their governments. Europe taking up its leadership in climate policy will require a stronger vision and a bolder industrial policy. Only the vision of a Just Transition will be able to create support for game- changing policies. This vision has to give people a sense of certainty over their future, based on the availability of green jobs and a decent income. For example, if we want to phase out coal quickly, people living in mining areas need real transition policies. The EU has to give high priority to investing in the job-creating potential of renewable energies and the zero-carbon industry of the twenty-first century.

John Kerry Visiting distinguished statesman at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former U.S. Secretary of State

We are paying a price that an American president went from leading on climate change to leading a deniers’ chorus. An American administration may have pulled out of Paris, but the American people are still in.

Leaders in Europe and the United States can rally the energy and commitment of nations around the world in a new spirit of cooperation, with the strength of diplomacy, focused on the solutions we all know can solve the crisis. We need to do more, and we all need to do it now.

Just because President Trump has put the world at risk is not a reason for leaders in other countries to shirk their responsibilities and accelerate the danger. We need adequate funding to help developing countries with climate adaptation and mitigation. And all of us need to make a greater commitment to move away from carbon intensive energy—and we can do that.

We have met the enemy, and it is man-made. But that means mankind can provide the solution. We will arrive at the global, low-carbon economy we need. It’s up to all of us to decide whether we will get there in time.

Patrizia NanzScientific director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies and professor of Transformative Sustainability Studies at the University of Potsdam

If Europe isn’t leading the anti-global warming campaign, who will? Germany has lost some of its momentum in fostering the transition toward a green economy and reduced CO2 emissions due to an increasingly uncertain governmental situation. For Germany, remaining a leader in environmental politics is finding ways on how to transform entire regions that are depending on brown coal—for example, Lusatia. A fast exit from coal would contribute considerably to the reduction of CO2 but would leave workers and their families without jobs and identity. With upcoming regional elections, their voices are being heard.

The big leap toward a sustainable and democratic future has to consider notions of justice for those who have to deal with severe changes in the short term. In a participatory and co-creative process, we scientists support regional actors in designing a process to trigger the creative and resilient potentials within a greater part of the population. If they can take part in designing a more sustainable future, the continuation of coal mining will lose its attraction. Making the Lusatia case a model for transformations in Europe would strengthen the EU as an anti-global warming leader as well as its role as a defender of democracy.

Yes, Europe may be leading the anti-global warming campaign but the EU's greenhouse gas emissions rose for three straight years up to 2017 (they fell in the same three years in the U.S.). Talking the talk is good but walking the walk is better.

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Alexis de Pleshcoy

December 07, 20181:02 am

The Anthropocene epoch is something the planet has never witnessed before.
The discussion can’t be limited to emissions, the time horizon can’t be the last two hundred years, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the West is not the world.
If the time horizon is expanded to 2100, the Rest experiences an explosive population growth, which leads to combined emissions far above Europe’s over the same period, invalidating Holemans’ assertion.
At the same time the West has transferred to the Rest not only its knowledge, but its industrial base also, through globalization or mondialisation; whatever white collar follows over the Internet. This was not done to atone for imperial wealth extraction and continuous war sins, but because the meritocratic elites chased profit with abandonment. The average citizen had and has no power to interfere with the process, other than hiring then firing one politician after the other. This average citizen has little left to offer, as the gilets jaunes and the deplorables have shown.
Europe, Merkel, Macron, Obama can’t change this reality.
Where the West is at fault is that the huge available resources were misallocated in financial speculation rather than in new technologies.
Malthus was proven wrong by new technologies, but it is cleat that whatever we have can’t scale at tens of billions of people. Imagine the tens of trillions $ lost in wars and financials since 2000 invested in fusion, better fission, HVDC and so on, and technology could have alleviated the impact of this population growth. Germany wouldn’t be today on brown coal, with old nuclear shutdown.
Even with these new technologies a low-carbon economy can’t grow forever, especially with the fruit of growth distributed by Milton’s people rather than Picketty’s.
The Club of Rome wrote in the 60’s the history of the future, with terrible accuracy. It simply not enough Earths.
Bolsonaro just expanded the discussion to the other important gas, oxygen. If the Amazonian forest is replaced by soy fields, the impact in the long run will be devastating. Isn’t it time to talk about oxygen credits, if we talk about carbon credits?
There is only one potential leader in mitigating the Anthropocene impact, and that is the UN, a reformed UN with India UNSC permanent member.
The West will probably not relinquish its ephemeral world leadership, but this is the only to engage the Rest in any meaningful collective action. After all it is the Rest leading in Green technologies.

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Horowitz TOI

December 07, 20181:10 pm

The future environmental cataclysm is upon us now. It's not just global warming but the vast extinction of species which is literally tearing at the fabric of the web of life. E.O. Wilson, Wendell Berry and Fritjof Capra (among countless others) have been warning us for years about the dangers of linear thinking inherent in statistical, capitalist economics and industrial agriculture. Now through the inanity of profit seeking agribusiness and unlimited urban expansion, the global population of insects is declining rapidly. This will have deleterious consequences both up and down the food chain. This is especially true toward the more complex life forms -- reptiles, amphibians and mammals. Forty percent of human crops are dependent on insect pollinators. The very lifeblood of human civilization, healthy soil, is impossible without hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions (we don't really know) of insects, bacteria and trace minerals. But the future of the insect population doesn't exactly grab the headlines of publications in the EU. Capitalist globalization has emphasized only one form of economic development -- the neo-liberal model. Billions of peasants have been driven off self sustaining plots of land in the name of spurious economic progress for the sole purpose of capital accumulation caused by geopolitical military competition. However organic soil, humus teeming with life, and in combination with green energy structures are civilization's best chance to rectify the gross misjudgments of a global economic system that has eclipsed a viable human scale ecology. Of course, without a structure of world peace, alternative models of human development will be nigh impossible. On this score, Europe fails pitifully. How can Brussels lead, when it can't even come to terms with its own working classes , let alone, Russia or China? The USA under Trump has adopted a pernicious form of realpolitik, while the more traditional form of US foreign policy -- uni-polarity across the Eurasia -- has led to the expansion of capitalist economic development, albeit in a state authoritarian model. India must meet the Chinese competition. Who will lead us into a new era? The most likely answer is no one. But it will certainly not be Europe, that is without a dramatic change in geopolitical direction leading to a new European architecture for security. In other words, solve the peace puzzle in combination with a new ecological development model. Time is short.

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kevinscottthompson

December 12, 20189:17 am

geoengineering is inevitable. even if we somehow completely stop all commerce or transportation tomorrow, we've already overheated the ocean. it's like turning off the oven, you still have a long time before you can pull the pan out.

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